Geetanjali Krishna: A 'good' time for love...

Valentine’s Day is celebrated all over the world on February 14, but in India, romance happens whenever the astrologers say so. Every year, there are a couple of days that the star-gazers deem “auspicious”, when tens of thousands of people tie the knot. In Delhi, over the years, there’s been a growing perception that what’s a good time for matrimony is a bad time for everything else. Last week, when we found ourselves in Agra for a family wedding, we experienced wedding madness way beyond what we’d seen before... and lived to tell the tale.

En route to Agra, we realised that traffic jams were getting more and more festive. We found ourselves rubbing shoulders with all manner of cars, all bedecked with flowers. All along the highway, there were farmhouses and gardens advertising weddings. To make matters more interesting, random thunderous explosions made us jump out of our skins every now and then — for the Pune bombing had made us freshly wary of loud noises. Turned out, it was just people in the wedding parties ahead, behind and around us, enlivening the boring streets by letting off a few crackers. Buses, trucks and tempos, all gaily festooned with flowers and streamers, were loudly exhorting passengers to buy tickets to Agra. “Only two hours to the Taj!” shouted one driver. “Nothing short of a helicopter can get one there in two hours,” my irate husband muttered, staring disconsolately at the colourful, chaotic scene ahead of us.

 

Several hours after we were scheduled to arrive, we finally crawled into Agra City. Greeted by narrow alleys, winding roads and cheap hotels looking as though they’d been piled haphazardly one on top of the other, we realised that getting to the wedding we’d been invited to was not going to be easy. In reply to our increasingly desperate pleas for directions, a rickshaw-puller said, “They’re saying there are over 400 weddings in this area today — asking for a yellow house where a wedding is taking place is like hunting for a needle in a haystack!”

As we dispiritedly hunted for the wedding we’d to go to, our enthusiasm had ebbed considerably. At the best of times, traffic in Agra is chaotic. That evening, chaos didn’t even begin to describe what we encountered. Serpentine lines of baraats (wedding processions), all with enthusiasm enough to dance to tuneless brass bands, stretched as far as we could see. Wedding invitees went from one wedding party to another, gatecrashing with abandon. Bands tried to drown each other out, resulting in crazy cacophony. A couple boasted of singers who sang both in a rich baritone and falsetto, negating the need for a second female lead. The effect, to say the least, was numbing.

“There it is!” I cried gladly, staring at a vaguely familiar yellow house ahead. The baraat was already moving, so we rushed to join up. After a couple of hundred yards (no small feat when the traffic was so bad), a suspicion that all wasn’t quite well, dawned … we were dancing in the wrong baraat!

Eventually, wedding attended (we made it to the right one in the nick of time), we headed back thankfully to Delhi the morning after. Crushed flowers sang odiferous odes to the mad night that had been. Bedraggled bandwallahs walked by, mere shadows of their night-time avatars. “The traffic will be fine today,” said our driver, “today’s not an auspicious date for weddings!” As we zipped down the road that had been so choked with wedding revellers yesterday, we vowed to check with astrologers when the next best date for weddings was to be — and make sure to stay in that night.